Throughout my design career, I've been told what a successful business is supposed to look like: a fancy studio, a full team, a packed speaking schedule, and a founder who's basically a full-time manager instead of a creator. Then, I read "Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business" by Paul Jarvis, and it changed everything I thought I knew about what "success" was allowed to look like for a one-woman show like mine.
Enter today's guest: Jessica Freeman, a web designer, SEO strategist, and the founder of The Ordinary Business, a community and podcast for the small but mighty business owners doing the work instead of chasing flashy numbers.
Jessica believes that being an ordinary business owner is the whole point, and once you stop trying to look like an agency, you get to build a business (and a life) that's actually YOURS.
That audition turned into a real conversation about the business world Jess and I both came up in, the one where a "successful" design business, means an agency Mad-Men style.
I learned a lot from designers who built courses teaching other designers how to scale, and even though I'm grateful for them, I also know I wasn't built to be one of them. I have no desire to teach, much less to scale (whatever that even means at this point...). I like being a one-woman show!! And so does Jess.
The Ordinary Business started on Threads, after Jess tried to schedule lunch with an online friend at a conference and got brushed off because she wasn't a speaker, wasn't "worthy" enough of the time. So she vented online (as anyone would) & set a bar: speakers making under $300K, under 5K followers, 5+ years in business. It got 40-ish comments and DMs from people volunteering, asking if there was a waitlist... And Jess's husband and a few friends told her she was onto something.
She resisted at first, worried it would muddy the waters with her design and SEO clients. Then her husband asked her the question that changed her mind: "If someone came to you wanting to pay for this idea, would you really say no?"
92 people *applied* to speak. She'd planned for 12. Being an overachiever who hates leaving people out, she didn't turn the rest away, she turned the leftover momentum into a podcast too.
What started as a vent post is now its own business, built on the idea that you can want to make your business better, not bigger. And the real conversation started when we got into what Jess stopped chasing once she figured out what "enough" actually meant for her.
First to go: the email list obsession. Everyone tells you your money's in the list. Jess has hired launch copywriters, paid $5,000 for a sequence that made her exactly *zero dollars*, and eventually admitted that email just doesn't work for her the way it works for other people.
She didn't delete her list. She just stopped expecting it to perform like everyone said it should. Now it's an evergreen sequence new subscribers move through automatically, plus one monthly recap email, and that's it. No more chasing open rates for a strategy she'd already proven, repeatedly, doesn't convert for her business.
Same story with visibility. Earlier in her career, Jess said yes to every podcast, every summit, every feature she could land and one year she blew past a goal of 40 features, which was... fun, but it did very little for her business.
Now the question isn't "Can I be on this podcast?" it's "Do I like this person and their audience?" Vanity metrics stopped mattering once she started asking whether the visibility was reaching her actual people instead of just padding a highlight reel.
And then there's the platform guilt everyone in this industry carries. Jess loves Instagram (loudly, unapologetically, while half of Threads is loudly quitting it) because it's her top lead source.
She's on LinkedIn on autopilot, mostly evergreen posts, barely any active engagement, and still landed two clients from it this year without posting a single original thing. Her actual top channels are referrals and SEO, tied, with Instagram close behind.
None of that came from following someone else's platform "playbook". It came from paying attention to what was already working and letting go of what wasn't.
The word "community" has been so hollowed out online that it's basically become a synonym for "followers" or "leads." Big accounts talk about "their community" while their audience feels, correctly, like an audience. You're watching their stories every day, but they don't know you exist.
Jess's Slack channel for the Ordinary Business summit didn't die the way most event Slacks do, and she had to actively reframe what an "engaged" community even looks like to stop measuring it against posting frequency.
Business owners are busy. They don't need to chat every 24 hours to belong somewhere. What matters is that when someone does post, people show up and respond, and that happened without a content calendar forcing it.
That's the piece that gets missed when people treat "build community" as a marketing tactic. Real community isn't something you build as a growth strategy, it's something that forms because people believe the same things and show up for each other without being managed into it.
Jess and I landed on the same read: you can't force belonging by trying harder at it. You build it by being genuinely yourself in public and letting the right people find their way in.
You don't need a big budget or a big following to deserve a brand & website that actually looks good. If anything, she thinks the case is stronger the other way, because people do judge a book by its cover, and too many great "ordinary" businesses get overlooked simply because they don't look the part online.
Good design isn't a luxury tier you earn once you've scaled. It's what helps people actually read the words you paid someone to write in the first place.
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✦ "Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business" by Paul Jarvis
✦ The Ordinary Business: Jess's community, summit & podcast for solopreneurs and tiny teams who'd rather be sustainable than scale
✦ Follow her on Instagram
✦ Check out her Website
✦ Say hey on Instagram
✦ Get my Uncaged emails
Web Designer & SEO Strategist
Over the last 5 years as a Brand & Marketing Designer, I’ve helped freaks like us design their unconventional brands so they can step onto the main stage & own their weird. Because if you wanted to be, look or sound like everyone else, you wouldn’t be where you are today. Now it’s your turn.
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